I’ve only worked in two Windows dominated offices. The first was Windows/Exchange/Office shop where the tools I needed at the time were also Windows only. I did set up a Linux machine as a SVN and print server at some point. We were way to small too have an IT department.

The next place was again a Windows/Exchange/Office and was large enough that it did have an IT department. Engineers, however, were allowed full control over their machines as long as they signed a thing that IT wouldn’t support them. About half of us ran Windows in a VM to get Exchange working.

Since then, everywhere has either been Linux or Macs for the engineers and usually Macs or Chromebooks for everyone else.

I did.

I use a cUSBC caddy with a 1TB M2 NVME SSD where I installed Aurora Linux. This setup allows me to leave the Windows license and the actual PC factory new, with the OEM license intact. I set the BIOS to boot to that drive first.

That’s all. Pure happyness.

I’ve been on several sides of this. As a sysadmin supporting a Windows dominated environment integrating Linux, as a user who wants to use Linux in a Windows dominated environment and in security trying to secure an environment with both Windows and Linux. In short, it depends on the use case, environment and the users’ tolerance for problems.

The first question which will come up is, “why?”. If you don’t have a good business use case, you should expect to be basically told to go get fucked. I realize that this seems like IT sticking their head in the sand, and it kinda is. But, also realize that you are asking them to take on extra work for nothing more than your own self edification. I have yet to meet an IT department which is so overflowing with time and resources that they want to take on new work which isn’t required. Even with the most basic use cases for Linux, IT is going to need to have resources dedicated to support, maintenance and oversight. Things like asset management, patching and license management don’t go away on Linux systems. Sure, the OS may not have a license to worry about (unless it’s RHEL or Ubuntu Pro), but there may be other software installed which is licenses and that license may be a different SKU on Linux. Then there are issues with ensuring IdM works on that flavor of Linux and supporting it when it breaks.

Along side that “why” question, be ready to answer the “why not” questions. Why not a Windows based alternative? Why not Cygwin/WSL? Why not a Linux based server that you SSH into from your main Windows desktop? Especially with a lot of workloads moving to the cloud, I’ve seen the mainframe model start to return, just with Linux instead of Unix/AIX this time. This sort of thing centralizes a lot of the IT headaches into a single host (or handful) which can much more easily be centrally managed. And that’s a theme to keep in mind, IT departments love centralized management. This is one of those places where Linux kinda lags Windows. Centralized management does work on Linux. It’s one of the reasons RHEL is all over the place, Satellite is like crack for IT departments dealing with Linux. But, a lot of centralized management looks like a folder full of Ansible scripts. With proper code management, it can work quite well. Keep in mind that many folks in IT are not coders and for a handful of Linux systems, dedicated resources which can handle that may not be in the budget (in the end, everything is about money).

Ok, so you have your “why” and are ready for “why not”. Let’s talk about the security stack. No, just because it’s Linux doesn’t mean you can ignore security. I’ve personally worked cases where Linux boxes got popped. And from the user side, things like ClickFix attacks are starting to crop up targeting Linux desktops. So, does your company’s software stack support Linux? This has, thankfully, started to be more common. Go back a decade and the answer was almost certainly, “no”. Partly because Linux wasn’t that common and partly because idiots believed Linux was fully secure by design. Anyone who believes that today shouldn’t be allowed to work on anything more advanced than an Etch-a-Sketch. With the dominance of Linux in the cloud, attackers are targeting Linux and your system will need to be ready for it. If your company’s security stack doesn’t support Linux, and/or your security department doesn’t have the expertise to monitor and respond to issues on Linux systems, you might find them resistant. Thankfully, that whole “Linux dominating the cloud” thing has started pushing security teams towards supporting Linux. And more advanced security teams often utilize Linux themselves in some capacity. So, that could ease your path a bit.

The final bit might be your tolerance for pain. If you’re out there on the bleeding edge, trying to be the first Linux system in an all Windows environment, expect things to break. No matter how well planned the rollout, the fact that the IT department hasn’t done this before means that they are going to miss stuff. It happens. If your system becomes a common source of trouble tickets, IT leadership may try to pull the plug. If you turn out to be a high maintenance user, you might find IT slow to respond and unwilling or unable to help with things aren’t working quite right. Some level of self-help and patience with a help desk which doesn’t have Linux expertise are going to be necessary. You really don’t want to become the phone number which pops up on the Help Desk queue and all the analysts scramble to avoid taking the call.

To conclude this long ramble. Linux systems in a Windows dominated environment is getting easier. That “the cloud” basically runs on Linux has gone a long way into getting Linux integrated into Windows environments. Microsoft has been forced to make their tools actually work with Linux, rather than the abomination which was setting up POSIX uids in a Windows 2000/2003 Active Directory domain. But, a lot of IT departments will still want to treat Linux as a server OS and not a desktop OS. MS Office, Teams and the rest of their communications and collaboration software still treats Linux as a pariah. Integrating and supporting Linux alternatives means budget and resources which aren’t dedicated to the core business. And that’s really what IT is going to care about.

That’s the rub. Microsoft has spent the last 40 years building business IT around their platforms. The word monopoly isn’t used to describe them as a joke.

I do that. Teams webclient works fine, Office web version suffices for basic things, VS Code works perfectly on Linux, and for the rest, I have a https://devbox.microsoft.com/

Running Linux affords me the possibility to be snide when inevitably something fails to work right on coworkers’ Windows machines. When my Linux box fails to work right, at least I know how to fix it.

Yes. Connect using the guest-network, and use webaccess via Office365. I run Debian. Why I do it: lower blood pressure, calmer and increased wellbeing, happier me, less frustration, things just work, things get stored where I want it, prints prints, no microsoft ads or info bubbles bragging about new function I don’t need… sum: I get more work done, using less time and energy.

At an IT-related business, I had a colleague reformat and install Ubuntu after he foolishly clicked on something he shouldn’t and compromised Windows on his machine. The rest of us weren’t affected and stayed on Windows, but I did feel a twinge of guilt that maybe I ought to have done the same (Installed Linux, that is, not clicked on malware).

For the work we were doing there was almost nothing that didn’t have a Linux equivalent, so it didn’t affect him much if at all.

For the rare exceptions, we had a virtual desktop server, which had existed prior to any of that, because we occasionally needed very old versions of software that would conflict with the modern versions on people’s PCs.

This was all over a decade ago though, so it’s hard to determine whether the same circumstances would have the same result.

I mean… by now probably millions of people have done it. I’m one of them, started in 1997. It was easier then in that for example nobody used “Teams” (it’s still the case that nobody should) and it was harder in that Wine was not as good.

Our office is slowly moving towards it. They just don’t call it Linux/Unix.

Our servers got cheaper so its just Debian. People use the office phones so its just Android/iOS for a lot of work out in the field. Only the office workers really use Windows now. Even our IIS servers are starting to get decommissioned. A LOT of things are going SaaS/cloud so theres less need of a dedicated anything at an office. Ironically Microsoft kinda did this to themselves.

Linux gets popular when people dont call it Linux.

Well, most of those can either run natively on Linux or have web-based clients.

• Teams works fine in a browser as long as you don’t mind some slight differences in the UI. There is also a well-maintained Electron app.
• Excel and other Office apps already work fine in the browser on Linux.
• OneDrive has unofficial clients on Linux, but you might as well just commit to accessing those files in a browser as well.
• SharePoint is already browser-based and integrated with OneDrive.

That said, CAD is definitely going to be an issue. In general, I wouldn’t recommend trying to switch all the way to Linux in a Windows-only office ecosystem. A better option if you can get permission is to dual-boot, or to run Windows in a virtual machine.

Yah, before Linux got as acceptable as it is now, I did it all þe time, as far back as 1995. I was a software developer, and had a lot of leeway at most places; nobody cared as long as I could get work done and most of þe engineering teams were exempt from regular IT restrictions because of þe demands of þe roles. When I moved into management þere was a period when I couldn’t do what þe job required wiþout Windows, but a brief time after þat it started to be more common to be able to get a Macbook, and at some point in þe 201x’s I could run anyþing I needed to on Linux and was able to switch back.

All in all, since 1995 I þink I had to be on Windows a total of 3 or 4 years. About as many, maybe 5, I used Macbooks.

It felt as if, in þe more recent years, IT departments got more involved in officially supporting dev teams, and when IT weren’t washing þeir hands of dev it got more constrained. But Linux also became more acceptable as a platform requirement at þe same time, so maybe it was a wash.

Yup, routinely use different techniques to run Linux on my work laptop. I’ve been at places where they have official support for Linux distros, with AD integration through services like sssd. I’ve also been at places where running a virtual Linux machine was possible, others where I was allowed to unlock secure boot temporarily to be able to to add a new signed binary for a Linux distro, running on a USB stick.

I’m running Linux on my uni laptop, and just use the microslop web-apps…

But I have a win10 machine that I remote into for CAD since that doesn’t run on Linux. Or I use the universities machines…